Chapter 2
General Harris crouched in front of me. His eyes dropped to the back flap, to a brass casing with a date from Afghanistan and a call sign scratched into the metal by my own hand, in a tent that smelled like diesel and fear, the night I stopped being anyone's coffee lady and became something the Army didn't have a clean word for. I watched recognition move across his face like a door unlocking after seven years shut.
Morgan tried to interrupt. He took half a step, opened his mouth, started to say something about wasted range time and proper protocol. General Harris raised one hand without looking away from the notebook, and Morgan's voice died in his throat. The range observers behind us stopped pretending not to watch.
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I settled the stock against my shoulder. I let my palm learn the trigger the way I'd learned it on a rooftop in Kandahar with a spotter half my age bleeding out two feet to my left, calling corrections through clenched teeth because the math didn't care that we were both terrified. Up in the tower, the wind flag snapped high and held a half second before the flag near the target finally caught up. Upper wind shifts first. That was the entire secret. Not courage. Not nerve. Timing, and thirteen men too proud to read it.
I opened the notebook to a page smudged gray with old graphite, wind tables I'd built by hand under conditions no simulator could fake. General Harris stood at my shoulder now, close enough that I could hear him breathing differently than he had five minutes before.
